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Hell's numb battlefield, a précis by Miklós Jancsó along the lines of the football commentary in Penn's Night Moves ("Nobody's winning. One side's just losing slower than the other"). A map's flatness gives way to the screen's depth of field with galloping horsemen, thus the Volga in 1919, the Civil War after the Revolution. Soviet-aiding Reds versus counter-revolutionary Whites, a matter of uniforms paraded and doffed in mathematical skirmishes. The first tour de force has a Tarkovskian view of the conflict, the elevated camera contemplates a White hiding in the riverbank and another being captured and executed; a later, similarly unbroken maneuver catches a Red fugitive and a nurse near a marsh, he's forced to sing while her stripped figure waits in the distance, then marched into the waters to be bludgeoned. A waltz at gunpoint in the woods, brass band and all, is Jancsó's most explicitly surreal gesture, otherwise the absurdity of war lies in the methodical unveiling of its dispassionate mechanism, a seesaw of oppressor and oppressed. Dialogue is pared down to barked commands ("Stand there!" "Line up!" "Get undressed and run!"), people are digits on landscapes, consciousness is a stark eye continuously tracking and craning. (The technique is strikingly reminiscent of Sturges' Escape from Fort Bravo, the inheritor is Clarke's Elephant.) From meadow to fortress to hospital, not war's fire but its confusion and tedium. Fordian horizons at the close merely set up a deadly geometric pattern, the defiant warriors walk right into it. A saber is raised at the ravages, dutifully but emptily—is the officer brandishing it the same who previously wondered if "a man can fight and still be human"? Cinematography by Tamás Somló. With József Madaras, Tibor Molnár, Jácint Juhász, András Kozák, Krystyna Mikolajewska, Anatoli Yabbarov, Sergei Nikonenko, and Bolot Bejshenaliyev. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |